Saturday, July 30, 2005

I'm currently holed up in the Heathrow Marriott waiting to fly out to OSCON 2005 first thing tomorrow morning. I'm being sneaky this trip and flying Air Canada via Vancouver into Portland in an attempt to shorten my queuing time through US customs and immigration as you can "enter" the US when you transfer between flights in Vancouver, and the queues for non-US citizens are usually fairly minimal...

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.